I just got my HD-2000 and it's the first HDTV device I have bought. I can't get any signal through my Terk TV55 antenna despite trying two different ones in different positions. Right now it's on my roof pointed towards the towers indicated by antennaweb.org. I used a GPS to precisely point it which worked well with the three satellite dishes I have around my house.

However, with the satellite dishes, I have a device that helps me point it. I don't think HDTV requires that much precision, but I still get 000 on the signal read.

The lights on the back of the card show a green light flashing randomly and a red light solidly on all the time.

I'm running the kernel from ATrpms and the pcHDTV drivers compiled cleanly after added the NEW_I2C patch.

Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2003 9:36 am

b96miata

Joined: 09 Dec 2003

Posts: 4

While you didn't mention what sort of environment you live in, how far you are from the towers, or what sort of antenna antennaweb said you should get, I would say your trouble is almost definately caused by your antenna.

Assuming you have the drivers installed properly (run signal or something to make sure you can open /dev/dtv) And you are using the proper channel numbers for your area (get them from titantv, not the ones on antennaweb) You'll be able to tell if you are getting signal or not. The green light will go almost solid (very rapid flashing) when you have a good signal. I would suggest running the scan program before anything else.

If you are far from the towers, or if you live in an urban area, or (same thing) if you have large buildings, forests, etc blocking your shot at the towers, you will almost certainly need a better antenna than the terk. If possible I would return the terk and spend the money on a good rooftop antenna and a nice long run of coax. Depending on what frequencies the hd channels in your area use, and whether or not you need regular tv reception, you might want to consider getting a UHF only antenna, as they will provide better uhf (typically) than a vhf/uhf combo of the same price.

I started out with a zenith silver sensor indoor antenna. (I live very close to the towers (~10mi, if that) but I'm in an urban environment so there are plenty of buildings to mess with the signal) I found the zenith to be inadequate. I could barely get pbs and abc, and they were right on the border of an useable signal, frequently cutting out and limiting my hd watching excursions to 2 minutes or so at best. for about 50 bucks I picked up an 8-bay bowtie antenna made by channel master, mounted it on the mast on my roof and got an immediate improvement in signal, as well as the acquisition of more channels.

Overall I would reccomend getting a medium to large sized outdoor only antenna. This should at least get you a useable signal on several channels and after that you can determine whether or not an amp is necessary.

Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2003 11:58 pm

Anonymouse

Guest

While I won't defend the Terk TV 55 as a good antena, the simptoms don't point to a bad antenna. They point more to a headphone short. Don't worry, this is easy to do.

1) there are two antenna inputs on this card, are you shure you have the correct one connected.
2) the Terk TV 55 is a powered antenna, are you sure it is getting power (the TV 50 had an LED on it See if the 55 has one and see if it is lit).
3) Are you sure you are selecting the correct channel? HDTV allows channel remapping so a station whos NTSC broadcast is on channel 3 can have their ATSC channel claim it is on channel 3 even if it is actually on channel 45. If you tell the card to tune to channel 3 it will not find any ATSC signal.

Even with a coat-hanger you should see a non zero signal strength when tuned to a ATSC channel within 20 miles of you. Worry about what type of antenna you have after you start seeing that there is actually signal there.

Same problem!

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2004 5:48 pm

gherlein

Guest

I have the same problem. I am using a RedHat 9.0 box, using the supplied driver for that version of linux. I have an Athlon 1.8GHz box with the card installed. It is the only BTTV card in the system. I am using the "primary" RF input I am in San Francisco and have multiple DTV stations available, with the tower 3.2 miles away. I *should* be getting lots of signal, despite the fact that I am in a 1 story house wit multiple 4+ story buildings around. I have tried both an omni antenna and a directional, with and without an extra +10dB gain amp, and the directional has an internal amp and is rated as excellent at
http://www.projectorexpert.com/Pages/antin.html - same results for both antennas in all combinations of gain, in all directions.

I get this same result for all channels. Scanning for channels yeilds no results.

What is wrong?

Testing

Posted: Wed Jan 07, 2004 9:57 pm

Anonymouse

Guest

Is the antenna a UHF antenna? Channel 56 is at the high end of UHF, and a VHF only antenna will not do very well with it.

Did you try both inputs? (I belive the pcHDTV card has two inputs (I don't actually have one)).

Is the card set to tune in ATSC not NTSC? 56 is KTVU-DT, an ATSC station from Oakland broadcasting from San Fransisco.

Have you verified this antenna works with nearby analog channels broadcast from the same tower? (say UPN on channel 44?)

Is the card set to antenna mode and not cable mode?

Re: Testing

Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2004 3:56 pm

Guest

Anonymouse wrote:

Is the card set to antenna mode and not cable mode?

I think it might have been a problem with NTSC/ATSC mode in combination with a driver.

What the red and green lights mean.....

Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2004 7:42 am

Spinoza

Joined: 08 Jan 2004

Posts: 27

When I started experimenting with the card, I noticed these lights would blink and go on and off. Once I got the driver working, and show me signal strength I realized exactly what the lights meant...

Green Light... Blinks for each successfully read of something... maybe it's an ATSC packet... maybe it blinks for a correct reed-solomon decode... who knows.... If you can "SEE" it blinking .. ie it's not solid, if you have NEXT TO NO SIGNAL.

Red Light.... When it's on... you won't be able to correct decode an ATSC signal... Red means stop right?... Once it goes off, you have good enough signal to watch the stream...

I find these lights much more accuate then the signal strength meter for telling me if I'm ok to watch the stream or not...

So.. if I start with my anntenna pointed away from the towers... and slowly turn it in the right direction, here is the sequence the lights go through.

I find that the Zero signal point in the signal program is at about number 3.

Some of my draft versions of linux 2.6.2 driver fixes signal reading a slight bit, allowing us to see unequalized signal strength (along with equalized); I wonder if the unequalized signal strength corresponds to either of those lights; I seriously doubt it. You can see the modifications I made to the driver to the signal reading function (look at some of my latest drafts for this --- but don't actually necessarily use those entire drafts unless you want to start that as another project!), and port them easily enough to any version of the driver, I assume; mostly get buf[x] where x is correct for the last read (I think it's a really simple bug?). I describe this more accurately inside my big post for "driver for 2.6.2", which is and will be unfinished, unfortunately. Also, I have some jiffie hacks and card read sync checking and retrying loops, too, for the signal reading routine, which might help in 2.4.24 (since jiffies are 10 times longer in 2.4), but definitely help in 2.6 (since jiffies aren't the right approach, we think; for now, perhaps we ought to change all the jiffie values in 2.6 driver to 10x what they were for 2.4 working?).

I'm glad you cataloged this data; I wondered for a few weeks why my red light was missing when I had the antenna in a different spot --- I thought something was wrong! That did confuse me, since I was experiencing the best antenna location and data input I ever had (no drops in data stream, all channels worked, etc.)